I'm fairly new to this setting - does enabling ACHI on my SATA controller effect my optical drive or only my HDD? Forgive my ignorance on this, but only recently have I built a PC where this was a choice - everything was IDE.

I have two Samsung SH-222AL SATA DVD burners. On my old ASRock mobo, they and my two SATA hard drives worked great in IDE mode, with XP and Win 7 Pro 32-bit.When I switched to a Gigabyte board in June of this year, I went the AHCI route from scratch for the burners and SATA hard drives.The hard drives worked great, but the DVD burners performed terribly, especially with Exact Audio Copy. With my SATA burners in AHCI mode, my CD rips would start at 0.5x and end at 1.5x, with lots of buzzing, clicking and clanking.I found in my mobo manual that SATA ports 4 and 5 can be left in IDE emulation mode while ports 0 through 3 can use SATA/AHCI mode via a BIOS setting.I switched the burners to SATA ports 4 and 5 and enabled IDE mode for them, and left the hard drives in SATA/AHCI mode. Immediately, my rip speeds started at 9x and finished at around 25x and spun like a top. I don't know about anyone else's burners, but it paid off for me to experiment with settings and ports.

Interesting - I thought that ACHI would have no affect on optical drives, but the above shows otherwise. My ASUS board also allows for ports 5 & 6 to be different than ports 1-4. Might set it up that way and see what happens. Thanks for the input. By the way, I am running Win 7 64-bit.

Would it be fair to say that it's possible that AHCI can actually degrade optical drive operation?

It's possible that native command queuing is screwing things up. Take a look at this image for instance (shameless pulled from Wiki)

The left one is better suited for a optical media. The right one a hard drive head can do because it was meant to snap back and forth like that. Also, optical drives, despite being technically RAM (as in, random access memory), they aren't very good at it.

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